Wise Words from Wystan

Back with Great Uncle Wystan having seen off a couple of short books in the interim, The Dyer's Hand was a good find in Chichester Oxfam. He's expansive alright and one wonders if he's really worked out all his systems in advance or if he makes it up as he goes along. The Collected Shorter Poems is more readily enjoyable than the Collected Longer, biographical detail reports that he went from self-appointed mentor to a generation of poets, or Stephen Spender at least, as an Oxford undergraduate only to return there in his last years, still issuing truisms but more repetitively. He was not a disciple of the 'less is more' school.

At first, if that isn't just a little bit tiresome, one at least suspects a tendency to ramble as his later, American poems tended to but, then, we can all be guilty of that and, in among the outpourings of theories and analysis, there's much to admire.

He's very fair to D.H. Lawrence in the circumstances but, crucially, finds that,

Very few statements which poets make about poetry, even when they appear to be quite lucid, are understandable except in their polemic context.

Yes. What poets say about poetry, all those famous quotes, are agendas, justifying their own practice, not definitions.

He points out that Keats didn't say that 'beauty is truth, truth beauty'. It was the Grecian urn that said that. We'd better have a closer look at that, after all these years.

And, at a very difficult time when the mentality of the United States of America is under scrutiny again, Auden is brilliant in setting out some essential reasons why it is an entirely different culture - he might have said 'mindset' had the word been available to him - and that, no, for better (in that he cites seven major poets who can't be coralled into 'movements' or 'groups') or worse, for example,

as Americans, they were already familiar with the dehumanized nature and the social leveling which a technological revolution was about to make universal 

which, in 1963, was a long time before Donald Trump opened his Twitter account.

 

Auden reads his Shakespeare closely, is deeply suspicious of the avant-garde, perhaps puts in place more wisdom than we might want to be told but it turns out that much of it is right. Perhaps it's the confidence with which he dispenses it that threatens to offend before one has to accept, no, it looks like he's right.